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Without much fanfare, the Biden administration formally ended the Trump-era Stay in Mexico policy on Tuesday, the program that required asylum seekers who crossed the border illegally to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard by them. US immigration judges.
The move comes amid a 20-year record of illegal border crossings and a deepening humanitarian crisis along the southwest border that began as soon as Biden took office in January and set out to dismantle Trump’s restrictive border policies.
In a note, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the program, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), was not adequately or sustainably improving border management. What could this mean? This certainly doesn’t mean the MPP wasn’t working, as apprehensions at the border plummeted after its implementation and only increased after Biden suspended the program, signaling to the world if you can cross the Rio. Great, you can stay.
Migrants attempt to cross a fence to the United States from Mexico at the border on April 21, 2021 in San Luis, Arizona. Nick Ut / Getty Images
What Mayorkas means is that under the program, too few migrants entered the United States, and many more were discouraged from making the journey north from Central America and Mexico, knowing that they would have to wait in Mexico, often under difficult and dangerous circumstances, while awaiting the outcome of their asylum application. Given these options, many of them decided not to come.
In the tortured logic of the Biden administrations, such deterrent policies amounted to a broken immigration system. We have heard time and time again from the administration that Biden inherited a dismantled asylum system from Trump and that the task now was to rebuild a viable and sustainable way of managing the border.
It does not make sense. Trump’s border policies may have looked drastic after decades of reckless border policies on both sides, but they were equally effective if your goal was to secure the border from illegal crossings. By this measure, Trump succeeded where others had failed. You don’t need to turn so many people away at the border before the home communities learn that the trip is not worth it.
What Biden wants is a return to the status quo, which means letting in almost anyone who seeks asylum, no matter how fragile their case may be. The border crisis that started in 2019 occurred largely because Central American families exploited a loophole in U.S. asylum law that allows asylum seekers to be released in the United States while awaiting ‘outcome of their case. These cases take years to be tried, meaning anyone who has crossed the border with a child can apply for asylum and be released within days. It was a huge incentive, and it drew people from all over the world.
Now the incentives are back, bringing near record numbers of migrants to the border.
President Joe Biden has dismantled the restrictive border policies of former President Donald Trump. Brandon Bell / Getty Images
Democrats don’t care about seeing today’s illegal immigrants as tomorrow’s liberal voters, and view any border restrictions as somehow racist. But they know that a majority of Americans do not agree with these policies. That’s why Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden has called upon to lead the administration’s response, is working to disassociate herself from the fiasco unfolding along the Rio Grande and has yet to visit the border. Biden doesn’t want Americans paying attention to what’s going on there and Harris doesn’t want to be blamed.
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